A sprawling Florida mansion, nestled next to a powdery white sand beach overlooking the azure Gulf of Mexico, is currently the most expensive real estate for sale in the United States, yours for just $295 million.
It is also located in one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate-induced disasters and faces a near-inevitable flood in the coming years.
The three-acre gated retreat in Naples – styled as “Florida’s most exclusive complex” and complete with two enormous guesthouses, a dock, a yacht mooring and water views on three sides – stands as an extravagant symbol of how desire to a sultry atmosphere Florida lifestyle collides with the climate crisis.
“It is almost certain that this property will experience a flood,” said Jeremy Porter, a climate risk researcher at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit flood analysis organization.
According to First Street’s modeling, the $295 million Gordon Pointe property has a 68% risk of flooding over the next 15 years and a virtually guaranteed 95% chance of flooding over the next three decades. Flood exposure is “severe” and wind risk is “extreme” according to the climate threat ratings now appearing on Zillow property listings.
“It’s a beautiful area, people here want access to the water and beaches, but it’s extremely exposed to flooding,” Porter said. “These are essentially properties built on water.”
The expensive Gordon Pointe enclave was owned by the late financier John Donahue, who died in 2017, and his wife Rhodora, and is now being sold by the family trust. It sits at the tip of Naples’ exclusive Port Royal district, which consists of low-lying, thin stretches of land carved out by canals that dangle from the south side of the city.
Mangroves, swamps and protective sand dunes have been wiped out here so that multimillion-dollar projects can be located as close as possible to the sea, which is 6 centimeters higher than in the 1990s and is rising faster and faster due to the burning of fossil fuels .
The threat to this idyll is starkly illustrated by the five hurricanes that have battered Florida’s western flank in the past two years, most destructively with 2022’s Hurricane Ian and, more recently, the swift one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. . Naples has seen its streets flooded, its houses torn apart and its pier destroyed by storms driven by an overheated Gulf.
“There’s been construction right up to the beach, we’re very low, we don’t have good dune reinforcements now and no one really thought about a storm surge here until Ian happened,” said Michael Savarese, a geology and climate expert. expert at Florida Gulf Coast University, on Naples’ exposure.
“The entire region is very vulnerable to nuisance flooding and storm surges and if we get storms like the last two years, there will be no time to catch our breath.”
This vulnerability has led to a shocking situation in which the glittering ownership of a crown jewel in a destination state with a booming population is threatened by a climate-induced disaster, as is the case in few other places in the US.
“They’re just buying time, borrowing time,” Savarese said of the string of lavish homes in Port Royal. “We are following the more extreme curve of sea level rise and nuisance flooding will be an even greater concern with any high tide. We didn’t handle this properly and we were caught with our pants down.”
There may still be willing buyers for luxury real estate along Florida’s coast, but the climate crisis is increasingly bucking the prevailing trend of hordes of Americans, many of them retired, flooding into the state for the promise of warm weather and no state taxes .
Home insurance rates in Florida, already the steepest in the U.S., rose an average of another 42% last year. Amid a deluge of disasters, at least a dozen insurers have fled Florida and a state guaranty system is now “insolvent,” according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis, meanwhile, has responded to this new era by removing mention of climate change from state law.
In Naples, this resulted in a city-prepared climate change vulnerability assessment having to be rewritten to remove the words “climate change” before it could be used to apply for state funding for upgrades to key facilities such as the stormwater system. no flooding in the streets during high tide.
“I just go with it,” Natalie Hardman, natural resources manager for the city of Naples, says of the make-believe world she faces. “It’s the game we play, I guess.”
Facing more intense storms and increasingly destructive heat, Naples has tried to keep the water at bay by strengthening critical infrastructure and adding resilient design requirements for buildings, while also clearing post-storm debris.
“Unfortunately, we have to do a lot of practice here,” Hardman said of the cleanups. “Hurricanes are coming with increasing frequency, and we are learning lessons from each one. Sometimes it can feel very overwhelming, but we think ahead and try to stop problems before they start.”
At a certain level of wealth, such concerns may seem trivial. The largest homes in Naples are solidly built to withstand winds and many have their own deployable flood barriers or sea walls, even as the surrounding streets still fill with water and sand, creating “island homes in a wasteland,” as Savarese puts it expressed.
Port Royal was established in the 1940s as ‘the most beautiful place in the world to live’ and the main Gordon Pointe mansion – a hefty 22,800 sq ft with six bedrooms and 24 bathrooms – strives to deliver on this ambition with craftsmanship that is designed to withstand whatever a supercharged nature can throw at it.
“This home was built with incredible building materials and has virtually indestructible features,” said Katherine Frattarola, principal of HUB Private Client, an insurance advisory service for high-net-worth individuals. Getting insurance on the property would be “very, very expensive; seven figures a year,” she added, but someone who can spend a third of a billion dollars on one house is “in a whole different tier.”
Such a person “doesn’t really think about risks, they think about how much they love Naples and, honestly, about having the most expensive house in America,” Frattarola said. “They can easily afford any repairs.”
But those outside the billionaire class are starting to shudder at the rising cost of paradise, with shoppers who could spend $5 to $10 million on a beach house now looking to the Carolinas or Georgia’s coast for their purchases, Frattarola said .
“We are increasingly having conversations about ring-fencing assets to pay personalized insurance premiums,” she said. “It’s now, ‘Oh, I have to find insurance and pay for it?’ People are starting to look at different geographies.”
Most Americans, of course, live much more modestly than this and often struggle to recover from a major disaster, even if they can afford insurance premiums that have soared in recent years. As storms rage along the shores of low-income earners, those wealthy enough to cocoon themselves on the beaches may be the last here until the tides completely engulf Southwest Florida.
“The areas at high climate risk have the wealthiest people, so it’s worth thinking about who the beneficiaries are when we subsidize flood insurance,” said Parinitha Sastry, a financial expert at Columbia Business School who has researched the fragility of the insurance market in Florida.
“It is possible that we see some kind of climate segregation due to risk-based pricing, but the alternative is that there are many vulnerable people in high-risk areas who are constantly experiencing shocks,” she said. “Houses are a primary source of wealth, so without that price signal you make lower-income people even more vulnerable to losses on their most important asset.”
The next hurricane is less likely to deliver such a life-changing shock to Gordon Pointe’s new owner. Anyone who buys the complex, secluded at the end of the peninsula with only the waves as neighbors, will not even be bothered by people: “There is no traffic passing by, no one looks through your window,” as a promotional video puts it. the development a “rare and exceptional asset”. The real estate company selling the property did not respond to questions about climate risk.
But is it, or any house, actually worth $295 million? “A banana stuck on a canvas can sell for $6.2 million,” Frattarola said, referring to a notable recent sale of artwork. “If someone is willing to pay that, I suspect there are buyers for everything, at all kinds of prices.”
